Something Not Yet Noticed

By Anonymous / Winter 2021

Dear M,

It’s been a while since I thought about you. I wanted to talk to you about something that I wish I knew when I was your age. I came to a better understanding of how systemic racism is alive and well in America. You don’t even really understand what this means yet, or what it means to the people around you, but I think it’s one of the most important things you’ll come across while growing and exploring the world.

Affirmative Action was one of the first political things Dad ever talked about. You were in highschool, talking about college admissions. He told you, “Even if I’ve got the best qualifications, some black guy who’s average has a better chance of getting the job.” I remember this stuck out to you, because -- yeah -- it didn’t seem right that certain groups of people should get “special privileges” because of their skin color. It really doesn’t seem logical when you think about it, right? I remember you fell in line with Dad’s beliefs about this for a long time.

I remember hearing a lot of the same rhetoric in history class. “Racism is bad! But it’s okay, we solved it a long time ago, see?” The teacher would then recite Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address​ or Martin Luther King Jr’s ​I Have a Dream​. And it was exciting! To be able to look back in the past and see what progress we’ve made as a nation. It made you proud to be an American.

Something I came to notice throughout the years was the ​context ​that surrounded policies such as affirmative action. Why were they put in place to begin with? Maybe they had a reason at one point, but now are no longer needed? I remember being in your shoes and never knowing the answer to these questions. Because of this, I remember you looked at these types of policies with spite. It felt like the tables were being turned on you, when you had nothing to do with the past. It wasn’t fair. And I understand that feeling, but maybe there’s something you weren’t noticing just yet.

There are a lot of things that they didn’t teach us in school. They taught us the changes in society without revealing the consequences that sunk deep into American policy and culture. They taught us the passing of the 15th amendment that allowed black men to vote, without illustrating how disenfranchisement was still prominent by means of other tools and methods in America. Just because blacks had the right to vote on paper, that doesn’t mean they were given a fair chance to actually carry through that right. They were intimidated, taxed, and tested with silly, sometimes unanswerable questions that not even you, a law abiding citizen of America could answer. When I first learned about this, I was frustrated and disappointed in our nation.

Regardless, you were taught that this was long ago dealt with. What about today? I remember there was talk of this “systemic racism”: the idea that racist policies are embedded in our government. All I know is that people around you generally disregarded it, and eventually so did you. Why entertain the idea, if we have already done everything we can do to prevent racist policies? We added the 15th amendment and various laws that protected the black citizens of America. What more could be needed?

Well, it seemed that there were some more sneaky and disingenuous policies that replaced the explicitly racist ones after being overtly racist went out of style. An example of this is redlining. Redlining is a policy that ensured racial segregation in neighborhoods. Black neighborhoods were colored in red on maps all across the United States. These redlined neighborhoods were then characterized as risky places to invest. From the lack of investments in these black neighborhoods resulted in overall lower socioeconomic status for the people in those neighborhoods. I hope you can see how this continued to spiral downwards.

Though redlining isn’t implemented anymore today, its effects on people of color is astounding. Even today, minority communities are highly correlated with lower socioeconomic wealth. This has further consequences. Since the funding of schools is determined by local property taxes, it’s clear to see how redlining caused this unfortunate chain of events to occur, where blacks and people of color are especially targeted by these age-old and forgotten policies.

So this “systemic racism” started to make a little more sense for me by knowing these things, and I hope you can take a look at this, and come to feel the same way. It’s frustrating and defeating to learn how great America is, and how we have changed for the better, just to be confronted with an opposing reality. Something that I’ve learned is that it’s possible to appreciate America, while wanting the best for our people. Acknowledging the faults of American policy and having the willingness to want to change them is more liberating than complacency and ignorance.

Think back to when you were proud of America’s accomplishments. Think of Rosa Parks and MLK Jr. Think of their willingness to confront what they thought was wrong. And think of how you can also be a part of a new change -- one that someone will look back in the history book and say “I’m proud to be an American.”